Allied Intervention and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1922

MICHAEL KETTLE. Russia and the Allies, 1917–1920: Vol. II: The Road to Intervention, March–November 1918. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Pp. 401.

RICHARD LUCKETT. The White Generals: An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Pp. xvi, 413.

TERENCE EMMONS, trans, and ed. Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xvii, 513.

DONALD J. RALEIGH, ed. A Russian Civil War Diary: Alexis Babine in Saratov, 1917–1922. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1988. Pp. xxiv, 240.     

REVIEW

The Mainland Haole: The White Experience in Hawaii. By E. Whittaker. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. Pp. xxxiv + 233.     

Masculinities,Race and Nationhood – Critical Connections

Books reviewed in this article: Hazel V. Carby, Race Men Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in aWhite‐Collar Union, 1944‐1994 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and theImagined Fraternity of White Men     

Good guys or bad? Middle class blacks and the black community

William Alan Muraskin. Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 318 pp. $14.95.     

Book Reviews

Anatol Lieven, Ukraine and Russia: a Fraternal Rivalry Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe Francisco Letamendia, Game of Mirrors: Centre–Periphery National Conflicts Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratisation and Nationalist Conflict Bernard Crick, Essays on Citizenship Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions Susan‐Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies – Reburial and Postsocialist Change. The Harriman Lectures     

Review

Voyaging through the contemporary Pacific Edited by David Hanlon and Geoffrey M. White Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2000. Pp.xii + 443 Price: US$26.95 (pb); US$90.00 (cl)     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Ngaire Woods (ed.), The Political Economy of Globalization Alan Doig and Robin Theobald (eds), Corruption and Democratisation Rita Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa Pierre Englebert, State Legitimacy and Development in Africa Clarck C. Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa Mark Breusers, On the Move: Mobility, Land Use and Livelihood Practices on the Central Plateau in Burkina Faso James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt Elisabeth Croll, Endangered Daughters. Discrimination and Development in Asia Arun Agrawal, Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People Evelyn Blackwood, Webs of Power: Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village Shirley A. White (ed.), The Art of Facilitating Participation: Releasing the Power of Grassroots Communication Bertus Haverkort and Wim Hiemstra (eds), Food for Thought: Ancient Visions and New Experiments of Rural People Barbara Harriss‐White and S. Subramanian (eds), Illfare in India. Essays on India’s Social Sector in Honour of S. Guhan     

Cowboys,Indians, and being human

Niels Winther Braroe. Indian and White: Self‐image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. x + 205 pp. Dlustrations, bibliography and index. $8.50.     

THE ENDURING POWER OF RACISM: A RECONSIDERATION OF WINTHROP JORDAN'S WHITE OVER BLACK

As a history of the origins and development of American racism, White over Black received great acclaim upon its publication in 1968. Deeply researched and covering some 650 pages, it eschewed professional jargon and offered a deft prose style and close attention to matters of sexuality in revealing the origins and lasting influence of racist attitudes arising from Englishmen's impressions of blacks before they became, preeminently, slaves in North America. Jordan's careful weighing of evidence and causation made readers appreciate what he believed his evidence repeatedly demonstrated about white Americans’ attitudes toward African‐Americans: “the power of irrationality in men.” Despite the initial acclaim and scholarly achievement, White over Black soon lost pace with the curve of politics and academic fashion. By the mid‐1970s, the post‐World War II liberal consensus on racial issues had disintegrated, and professional historians were writing principally for other professional historians. Within a decade after its publication, White over Black was relegated to the wasteland of the “suggested supplemental reading list.” However, the book's grasp of the fundamental historical issues requiring explanation has received recent affirmation from influential scholarly and political quarters. A dispassionate review of the literature leading up to and following White over Black's publication indicates that Jordan's emphasis on the causal contribution of racist attitudes to the rise of African slavery in British North America was on target. Moreover, Jordan's appreciation that academic historians should write for nonprofessionals is now widely held inside the academy. The historical accuracy and cogency of expression of Jordan's perspective on race and slavery make White over Black worth reexamining.     

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.     

MakingGüeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product's representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

Creando güeras: La venta de identidades blancas en la televisión Mexicana de media noche En este artículo, hacemos un análisis sobre los discursos de ‘blancura’ y de color con respecto a la población en México a través de una discusión sobre ‘White Secret’, un producto cosmético para aclarar la piel que es muy disponible en México. Por un análisis de un ‘info-nuncio’ que sale por la televisión anunciando el producto ‘White Secret’, exploramos los entretejemientos de la construcción de blancura en México y como este ‘info-nuncio’ manipula imágenes de los cuerpos de güeras (mujeres de piel clara) y tecnología cosmética avanzada. Reflexionamos acerca de las maneras que el producto ‘White Secret’ pueda hablar a concepciones más amplias sobre la construcción de identidad y blancura y además, discutimos que tal exploración indica la necesidad de interrogar los limites epistemológicos y geográficos de la comprensión actual de la construcción de blancura basados en los contextos Latino Americanos y Anglo Americanos.     

Ethnic boundaries: Rural Hawaiians and Mainland migrants in Hawaii

Linnekin, Jocelyn. Children of the Land: Exchange and Status in a Hawaiian Community. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985. xvi + 264 pp. including references and index. $27.00 cloth.

Whittaker, Elvi. The Mainland Haole: The White Experience in Hawaii. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. xiii + 233 pp. including references and index. $25.00 cloth.     

Issues,Coalitions, and Divided Government

Ryan J. Barilleaux, The Post-Modern Presidency. The Office After Ronald Reagan. New York: Praeger. 1988. Pp. x, 175. $35.95.

Richard Rose, The Postmodern President: The White House Meets the World. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers. 1988. Pp. x, 350. $17.95.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Mehta Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth‐Century British Liberal Thought. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. B. G. Verghese, India's Northeast Resurgent: Ethnicity, Insurgency, Governance, Development. Roderick Stackelberg, Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991. Bohdan Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence. Alfons Cucó, El Valencianisme Politic: 1874–1939. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian People: From Ancient to Modern Times, vol. I, The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century; vol. II, Foreign Domination to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic. Robert K. Schaeffer, Severed States: Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World. New York, Thomas D. Musgrave, Self‐Determination and National Minorities.     

Reviews

Books reviewed: H.A. Becker and F. Vanclay (eds), The International Handbook of Social Impact Assessment: Conceptual and Methodological Advances D. Edmunds and E. Wollenberg, Local Forest Management: The Impacts of Devolution Policies Ron Johnston and Michael Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, Tree Culture: the Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place Linda McDowell, Redundant Masculinities, Employment Change and White Working Class Youth     

Native American studies and the white man's burden

Murray L. Wax and Robert W. Buchanan, eds. Solving “The Indian Problem “: The White Man's Burdensome Business. New York: New Viewpoints. Franklin Watts, Inc., 1975. 237 pp. Selected reading and index. $12.50.     

Telling government to fool people somewhere else

Robert Paine, ed. The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity. Newfoundland Social and Economic Papers No. 7. Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. 418 pp. $12.00.     

The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing: Undecidable bodies,mobile identities,and the deconstruction of racial boundaries

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies' most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre Lazarre, Jane. 1997. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, Durham: Duke University Press.  [Google Scholar], Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)     

Food and famine: Looking for answers

White, Philip, and Nancy Selvey, eds. Current Topics in Nutrition and Disease, Volume 10: Malnutrition—Determinants and Consequences. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1984. xvi + 494 pp. including references, index. $96.00 cloth.

Robson, John R. K., ed. Famine: Its Causes, Effects, and Management. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981. x + 170 pp. including photographs, references, index. $30.95 cloth.     

Interstitial women: East African experiences

Kilbride, Philip Leroy and Janet Capriotti Kilbride. Changing Family Life in East Africa: Women and Children at Risk. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. xv + 271 pp. including references and index. $29.95 cloth.

White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xiii + 285 pp. including notes, references, and index. $34.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.